Eugenics and Guilt By Association

It doesn’t make sense to say economic monetarism is a eugenic doctrine, or that belief in laissez faire economics will lead to a resurgence of prohibitionism, or more weakly that believers in monetarism and markets have to ‘own up’ to these doctrines, because it isn’t that hard to separate them out, intellectually.

Yeah, it’s almost like libertarianism isn’t actually close to feudalism.

“He advocated vegetarianism, avoiding red meat, and exercise,”

Oh, great: now all vegetarians are responsible for eugenics too. Because (here comes shrill voice) “Hitler was a vegetarian, you know!!!” (stop shrill voice).

“I have yet to encounter a conservative who acknowledges that before 1945 almost all American conservatives were anti-Semites.”

But EVERYONE* before 1945 was an anti-semite. Even some Jews! No one in that intellectual milieu seems to have escaped it.

Eugenics is similar, almost universal support amongst the intellectual establishment. In fact, it would be more interesting to look at who wasn’t a eugenicist (perhaps the individualist anarchists knocking around that time).

So either it is going to be historical recriminations all round because no one’s intellectual history is all that great. Or people will have to call pax. We could even take on Scott Sumner’s suggestion: forget the left’s (mostly historical) communist love affair, in return for forgeting the right’s (mostly historical) racism.

But then perhaps recriminations are more fun, and we’ll hardly get to sustain a peace on this with Goldberg smearing randomly on the right, and people on the left trying to frame Tea Party supporters.

*Not absolutely literal claim

Ok, I haven’t seen an example of people doing exactly that. But they try and impute the beliefs of conservatives 100-50 years ago onto many of those protesting today, usually without justification.

The really frightening thing about eugenics is not that that many/most Progressives believed in it. It’s that almost everybody believed in it. The list of names who were eugenicists is long and really quite frightening: W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, (whose Lady Chatterly’s Lover is really a eugenicist screed, if read right), Trotsky (!), George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, Keynes and Beveridge, R.A. Fisher (Fisher was such an ardent eugenicist he was nearly interned during WW2 on the grounds that he was likely to be a Nazi fifth columnist), Alexander Graham Bell, Theodor Roosevelt (I could go on and on and on and on)……. Nor can one assume that those intellectuals and scientists who did not write or speak about it were necessarily particularly opposed to it.

It was not a ‘progressive’ ideology. It was not a Conservative ideology. It was not a ‘liberal’ ideology. It was a ideology believed by swathes of people from many different backgrounds and many different political beliefs, although, of course it had special appeal to white, heterosexual, middle and upper class European/Australasian/North American males. As Nick above points out, only anti-semitism had a broader intellectual appeal.

The question mark that should therefore be appended is not to the ‘progressive’ tradition, but to the whole Western intellectual school of thought (‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’) in Europe, Australasia, and North America between, roughly 1850 and 1945, and its relationship to Empire building (another idea many intellectuals got pretty excited about at this time, again, both ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’). However given that this would lead to some tough questions being asked about imperial ideology and its relationship to ‘Western Civilisation’, and the relationship of pseudo science (cough cough, economics, cough) to barbarism, I think this is a discssion Goldberg will not want to have.

Goldberg wrote a book where he skipped every single Republican president when talking about abuses of power by the executive branch. When asked why, he responded “that wasn’t the story he wanted to tell.”

Why bother assuming that a political hack is anything but? He wants to beat up liberals, and eugenics is a useful stick. He isn’t paid to care about anything unfavorable about conservatives, living or dead.

I’m not sure that present-day American conservatives embrace Fisher and Friedman. They were both somewhat respectful of Keynes, for one thing. I don’t think anyone to the left of Mises will do really.

But that’s a side-issue. What does believing in eugenics entail? I don’t think it’s true to say that progressives were generally in favour of forced sterilisation. A much more common position was that the lower classes should be instructed in birth control. That was a bit paternalistic of course, but hardly evil.

The question the left, and academia has to ask is how much of current assumptions, current paradigms, current beliefs in social science relates to assumptions of racial superiority or racial hierarchy.

I posit fields like Sociology, Anthropology, and even Economics or Mass Communications do not sufficiently examine this question.

Prevailing paradigms in some of these fields include implicit or explicit notions of Western cultural or racial superiority.

Look at a map of red vs. blue and you will see that Goldwater/Nixon and the Southern Strategy is not a dead letter, by any means. It seems to me quite reasonable to pin stuff that Goldwater and Reagan said/did to conservatives/Republicans because, allegedly, conservatives/Republicans still believe that stuff. So they shouldn’t mind. On the other hand, holding some progressive whose never heard of Herbert Croly responsible for something Herbert Croly said seems to me much more unreasonable

Particularly as no modern progressive that anyone ever heard of believes in this eugenics nonsense, unless you count the authors of The Bell Curve as progressives. On the other hand, overt racism–teabaggers meet John Lewis–is quite common on the present day right.

“Now we get to the unfair bit. Root and Goldberg seem to think that if you are advocating progressivism today – rather than writing history – there is some vital need to self-lacerate, early and often, over the whole eugenics-a-hundred-years-ago business.”

Sounds like a useful thing to do really. “Progressivism” in some incarnations or definitions is based on the idea that greater State power over the lives of individuals can make things better for all.

This is certainly true for some levels of State power over the lives of individuals. It is not necessarily true for all levels of such power nor for levels greater than current (or even less than current). Keeping eugenics in mind as an example of when greater such power really isn’t a good idea is useful in reminding ourselves that greater or lesser State power isn’t a good thing in and of itself. It depends upon which power over what aspects of the lives of individuals.

I think mcd, Attenwell and Dsquared have said all that needs to be said. It’s the favourite tactic of the US ‘conservative’ moronosphere, the pre-emptive ‘I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I?’ Engaging on the level of serious historical analysis is likely to prove futile.

I think you’ve given up the idea that modern libertarians and conservatives want to remove our bowels much too quickly, John. It’s true that most don’t publicly advocate for it, but then, that would be the sort of thing to keep secret for now, wouldn’t it, making the silence just one more bit of evidence.

And I’m sure none of those famous liberals will come here and tell us once and for all that they condemn all that baby killing! Ha!

Progressivism was an elite, top-down movement, whose weak commitment to democracy made it fertile ground for garbage like eugenics; which is why I’ve never been very happy that liberals nowadays have been intimidated by Rovian name-calling into calling themselves progressives instead of liberals. The Progressives had some real achievements to their credit but theirs is not the model I would wish today’s center-left to emulate.

Ok, I haven’t seen an example of people doing exactly that. But they try and impute the beliefs of conservatives 100-50 years ago onto many of those protesting today, usually without justification.

Nick is full of shit as always (I love the “I haven’t seen an example” = “Oops, I was caught lying through my teeth”). All we have to do to see what these idiots actually believe is read their fucking signs.

Nick 04.21.10 at 5:23 am

“Ok, I haven’t seen an example of people doing exactly that. But they try and impute the beliefs of conservatives 100-50 years ago onto many of those protesting today, usually without justification.”

Yes, it’s not like Republicans are (literally or metaphorically) waving Confederate flags, in this day and age :)

I guess they had to mention Debs

Who of course would not have been at all amused to be lumped in with the Progressives whom he loathed as wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Goldberg is disingenuous when he criticizes 19th-century Progressivism for wanting to base policy on eugenics. He has a more basic objection to technocracy on even a rudimentary level. The point that everybody was a racist is more reasonable than it “feels” at first glance, for at least two reasons. One, although US Progressives may have been more willing to make certain medical interventions in order to influence the proportion of different types of people in the population, it is almost certain that the conservative parties did the same without acknowledging its being a deliberate policy. Two, without acknowledging the widespread nature of racism, the fact that this was actually consensus science is lost. He gets an easy emotional reaction by dwelling on “eugenics” and pretending he doesn’t understand why you have to think more when you change what you’re talking about even a little bit.

Goldberg is also probably drawing on Gertrude Himmelfarb’s critique of the Fabians, but an easy equation of Fabianism and Progressivism is not serious. (For one thing, the Progressives’ goals were much less ambitious.)

The government of Alberta, in Canada, only recently agreed to pay compensation to people forcibly sterilized as “feeble-minded” under legislation passed in 1928 and in force (amazingly) until 1972. (Over 2800 people were sterilized under the legislation.)

In the 1920s the main agitators for this legislation were members of the women’s suffrage and temperance movements. In fact, of the “Famous Five” women who initiated and then won the 1929 “persons” case that got women recognized as legal “persons” in Canada — and who are rightly celebrated for that achievement — three were active campaigners for eugenics and sterilization and significant influences on the Alberta legislation.

I don’t say this to make any Goldberg-type points, but if women’s suffrage was a progressive cause, then in Canada the main campaigners for eugenics, explicitly including sterilization, were progressives. This doesn’t have to be mentioned every time progressive politics is discussed, but it shouldn’t be hidden either.

Looking at historical discussions of “eugenics” is complicated by the fact that sometimes that term referred to the concept “let’s sterilize undesirable ethnic groups,” and other times it referred to the concept “perhaps it would be better for poor people to have access to birth control instead of having lots of children they can’t support,” and it’s not always clear what speakers were referring to at the time.

(This is not to claim that all progressives who talked favorably about eugenics were really on the correct side of the issue. The point rather is that you can’t just make a list of historical persons who said nice things about “eugenics” and expect to reach a meaningful conclusion.)

among the prominent backers of EUGENICS: President Taft, Senator Robert Taft, Prescott Bush (and children), Averell Harriman, Dillon Read, John Foster Dulles, J D Rocekfeller III, the Dupont family. Surely a progressive pantheon.

Take this for example, on racism (obviously, not as old as eugenics):

Nick, are you really denying that a significant motivator for Tea Partyism is racial animosity?

Really, alex? I am aware of at least a couple of upper-middle class 19th- and early 20th-century women who were persuaded they were “neurotic” and therefore unfit to have children.

There are a whole raft of issues that were supported primarily by suffragists, because they were labeled “family” issues. These included ensuring the “unfit” did not reproduce, as well as eliminating VD (which was considered a hereditary disease affecting children, not women, in part because married women were often not diagnosed, for the obvious reason). If others considered these issues important, it’s a good question why they left it to a special interest group.

There is a whole scholarly literature on eugenics and related topics, primarily carried out by left-leaning scholars, whom I assume Goldberg does not name or credit. At the time (coincidentally when Goldberg was in college) that kind of thing was considered “politically correct” and was anathema to anyone who considered themselves libertarians, Republicans, or conservatives.

I don’t know what people are calling “progressivism” today, I don’t know who CAP is or who funds them or what background their people have. I do know that Jonah Goldberg’s “historical scholarship” should be taken about as seriously as Ayn Rand’s ballet criticism.

I am sure there are racist groups within such a large national movement but they don’t seem to be central to its ideology.

What do you think of the racial attitudes of the ones who march with Confederate flags? What do you think of the racial attitudes of the ones who march with the ones who march with Confederate flags.

Polls have been taken in which the tea partyers talk about their support for/identification with Glenn Beck. Are you prepared to make the argument that Beck isn’t an overt racist? Limbaugh?

To answer my own questions: Folks who are that comfortable identifying with racists ought not get all offended at being labeled racist.

Heather Richardson review of Nancy Cohen Reconstruction of Anmerican Liberalism 2002

“Setting out to uncover the roots of modern liberalism, Cohen believes she found them in the thought of late-nineteenth-century economists and social scientists. Liberal thinkers of the first postwar generation, like E. L. Godkin and George William Curtis, faced squarely the implications of the postwar expansion of democracy to include workers and people of color. Quickly, they began to fear that the poor would threaten private property and individual liberty, key tenets of liberalism, by demanding cooperative action and redistribution of wealth. In response, Cohen argues, liberal reformers denigrated political self-rule and elevated the idea of the “economic man” who strove to succeed in the marketplace; they clung to the idea of laissez- faire government; and they abandoned equal citizenship and embraced racism. Their plan was to “limit and constrain the power of propertyless majorities in a polity that had recently erected universal male suffrage as its cardinal political ideal” (p. 220).

Saying that the ideas of the ruling class were the ruling ideas ain’t really saying much, until you deconstruct why the ruling class found those ideas useful.

“On this one issue, the problem of progress in a regime of consolidated
capital—depends the future of humanity. In so far as principles decide the
event, it appears that man has the power forever to progress.
This result will be gained if human evolution does not turn backward and
ensure a survival of the hopelessly unfit among industrial types.
Such a reversal of the order of nature has not elsewhere occurred.
We are justified in putting faith in evolution.”

john bates clark, ‘‘The Theory of Economic Progress,’’
aea Economic Studies 1, no. 1 (1896) …epigraph to the Nancy Cohen book

Technocratic elitism is at the heart of both the Progressive Movement and modern liberalism.

I demand the CAP condemn Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

“What do you think of the racial attitudes of the ones who march with Confederate flags? What do you think of the racial attitudes of the ones who march with the ones who march with Confederate flags.”

It means different things to different people. Just as “Family planning” continues to mean different things to different people: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/article680126.ece

A Danish side-note:

1. As others have noted there was a near-universal consensus from the late 1910s until the early 1930s on the benefits of eugenics (here defined as sterilisation, not elimination of “defective” individuals), with conservative religious circles as the exception. This also applied in Denmark and Sweden.

2. We should probably link this with the demographic transition taking place at the time. Among the middle-class intellectuals there was a pronounced fear that the underclass would dominate the population due to their higher birth-rates compared with the middle-classes. You will find endless discussions about the fear of the sexual activity of the underclass and the consequent genetic degeneration here.

2a. Just for fun: Try looking at the political discussion of Hispanic immigration to the US and Asian/Middle Eastern immigration to Europe and compare the arguments.

3. Yes, for progressives of that age eugenics was the flip side of social reforms like the introduction of general health care.

3a. By Jonah Goldberg’s standard everyone who advocate universal health care is a Nazi.

4. Come the 1930s and the problem changes as the birth-rates continue to fall. Now family policies and the question about getting the working class to have children become a major political issue. Eugenic policies do continue but political interest is dramatically limited compared with the 1920s.

4a. France had family policies promoting large families as did Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By Jonah Goldberg’s standards this obviously proves that the French are Nazis, the Germans Communists and the Russians Germans. Or French. Or whatever

“Setting out to uncover the roots of modern liberalism, Cohen believes she found them in the thought of late-nineteenth-century economists and social scientists. Liberal thinkers of the first postwar generation, like E. L. Godkin and George William Curtis, faced squarely the implications of the postwar expansion of democracy to include workers and people of color. Quickly, they began to fear that the poor would threaten private property and individual liberty, key tenets of liberalism, by demanding cooperative action and redistribution of wealth. In response, Cohen argues, liberal reformers denigrated political self-rule and elevated the idea of the “economic man” who strove to succeed in the marketplace; they clung to the idea of laissez- faire government; and they abandoned equal citizenship and embraced racism. Their plan was to “limit and constrain the power of propertyless majorities in a polity that had recently erected universal male suffrage as its cardinal political ideal” (p. 220).

This is classical liberalism, not modern day liberalism.

Why is it that “yes, many progressives were eugenicists, but that is not essential to progressivism, and the bulk of the intellectual elite were eugenicists too, so it’s not a defining trait historically” a valid way to acknowledge and then lay aside the issue, but “yes, many populists were racists, but that is not essential to populism, and the bulk of the population were racists too, so it’s not a defining trait historically” is just making excuses. Wasn’t that how it was treated when Emerson made that argument in the Populism thread? The interesting difference is “intellectual elite” vs. “population”. Did eugenics have more support among the intellectual elite than the population at large?

“the fear of the sexual activity of the underclass and the consequent genetic degeneration”

Isn’t that one of those universal historical constants? 19th century elites had a *slightly* more sophisticated understanding of genetics than a Bronze Age warlord, but other than that, upper classes have been worried about this for millennia.

It always turns out not to be as big a deal as they think because their aetiology of success is tainted by self-serving judgment, the fundamental attribution error, and essentialism (applied to subpopulations). Or in other words, they’re not as different from the lower classes as they like to think they are, so reproduction by one class isn’t really that different from reproduction by another. Individual humans are different from each other, but by the time you reach the class level, almost all the difference is within-group.

Hi John –

In this post you incorrectly charge me and my colleagues with failing to mention racism and sexism in the progressive past (“Root’s complaint is fair, but only up to a point. Here’s the fair bit: the CAP paper is a feel-good affair. Nothing about uglier aspects or excesses of American Progressivism: specifically, racism and sexism, hence eugenics.) In fact, you don’t even have the title and paper link correct in this post. We released a three-part series on the progressive intellectual, political, and social movements tradition (links below). You printed the title to our first paper with a link to our second and make no mention of our third paper in which we write the following:

“Progressive leaders themselves learned from the principled activism of social movements. Many mainstream progressive political leaders in the past were reactionary on issues of race and gender. At the same time, the seeds of the great civil rights triumphs of the 20th century came from within progressivism itself. An interracial coalition of progressives joined together to create the NAACP and many leading progressives emerged from the fight for abolition and women’s suffrage. The collective efforts of these movements eventually helped to turn progressivism itself into a stronger vehicle for human equality, social tolerance, and political rights for all people.”

If you want additional evidence on this front, I direct you to Chapter 3 of a book I co-authored with John Podesta entitled, The Power of Progress. We explicitly state:

“Looking back on the Progressive and New Deal eras, the historical record is markedly negative in terms of support for racial justice. Many leading progressives either actively promoted segregation (as Woodrow Wilson did by introducing formal segregation into the executive branch during his presidency), held attitudes of racial superiority (as was the case with Teddy Roosevelt), or were sympathetic but not inclined to support African American equality due to political considerations and the need for southern votes (which is the leading explanation for many New Dealers). As George Mowry shows in his overview of the era, some progressives (particularly middle-class urban reformers) were anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish—holding biases based on faulty assumptions about the role of immigrants in the corruption and poor sanitary conditions of the cities.

One might chalk up these attitudes to the times or political reality. But given the stated principles of progressives, it is not incorrect or historically backward to say that many progressives were just plain wrong on a critical set of issues having to do with human dignity and equality. It’s an important lesson that should chasten progressives to this day.”

I hope you will at least correct the record on your formulation of our position.

Sincerely,

John Halpin, Center for American Progress

The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America
Part One of the Progressive Tradition Series

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/04/progressive_traditions1.html

The Progressive Tradition in American Politics
Part Two of the Progressive Tradition Series

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/04/progressive_traditions2.html

Social Movements and Progressivism
Part Three of the Progressive Tradition Series

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/04/progressive_traditions3.html

Again, B. McManus’s point re the anti-democratic tendencies of contemporary liberals (aka the centre-left or social democrats) is fair enough, but it’s a bit odd to get hung up on terms like ‘progressive’ or ‘populist’ which are now just words and don’t refer to real political forces anymore (afaik).

‘As others have noted there was a near-universal consensus from the late 1910s until the early 1930s on the benefits of eugenics (here defined as sterilisation, not elimination of “defective” individuals), with conservative religious circles as the exception. This also applied in Denmark and Sweden.’

Actually the Swedish sterilisation programme was only stopped in 1976. (Although the ‘compulsory’ part of it seems to have been downplayed after the 1950s).

The Swiss programme, on the other hand, went on till the 1980s (and was, apparently, nastier).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization#Sweden

rea 23: exactly.

Bianca: “There is a whole scholarly literature on eugenics and related topics, primarily carried out by left-leaning scholars, whom I assume Goldberg does not name or credit. At the time (coincidentally when Goldberg was in college) that kind of thing was considered “politically correct” and was anathema to anyone who considered themselves libertarians, Republicans, or conservatives.”

Indeed.

“What do you think of the racial attitudes of the ones who march with Confederate flags? What do you think of the racial attitudes of the ones who march with the ones who march with Confederate flags.”

It means different things to different people.

I think Nick has revealed his true colors here. I’m certainly familiar with this line of argument, but it’s homeomorphic to the one about slavery not being the real cause of Secession.

@60:

Let me see if I understand your logic. In other words:

Since the Democratic Party historically up to the 60’s harbored the bulk of explicit racists, but since then, the explicit racists transferred from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party via the “Southern Strategy”, it’s not fair to describe the current Republican Party as the party of racists. This is because Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century was both a member of the Democratic Party and a racist.

Hmm… I guess I’m not convinced.

@75: ISTM that if you deny a One True Populism than the question of what is or isn’t essential to it becomes meaningless. So denying that racism is essential to populism is *affirming*, not denying, a One True Populism (in which racism is optional).

Although I guess what I really mean is One True Set Of Defining Characteristics Of Populism, which could be satisfied by more than one actual populist movement (indeed, if it weren’t, the category would be rather useless as a category).

If you think that categories are inherently fuzzy and arbitrary, then the question of whether racism is essential to populism is as meaningless as “if an unripe orange is green, can you still call it an orange?”.

It means different things to different people.

It always means being unconcerned about delivering a straightforward racist message. And by any sensible definition, that’s racist.

Anyway, I’m glad you’re not going to pretend that Beck and Limbaugh are something other than overt racists. You think Beck’s ties with the tea partyers are a coincidence?

“I think Nick has revealed his true colors here. I’m certainly familiar with this line of argument, but it’s homeomorphic to the one about slavery not being the real cause of Secession.”

I’ve seen the confederate flag worn by Poles who want one of their richer cities to be able seceed from the rest of their country. It honestly can mean various things depending on the context, like any symbol. Of course, I wouldn’t want to vouch for everyone who decides to wave that flag in the US.

In fact, I’d wager that probably something on the order of 90% of the American public (that part that believes in evolution, that is) think that “lower life forms evolve into higher ones.”

Sadly, I would not even dream of taking that bet. This misconception is deeply rooted in the popular mind.

I’d wager that probably something on the order of 90% of the American public (that part that believes in evolution, that is) think that “lower life forms evolve into higher ones.”

Are you serious? First, far less than 90% of the American public believe in evolution, second, those who do hopefully don’t all believe in the misleading characterization you just gave, and third, what does this have to do with eugenics?

Piglet, the first issue you have is your own misreading I think (ignoring the modifier in brackets), the second issue I would think that it isn’t that unlikely – it is certainly a very common misconception anyway, I think for the third point it is a oblique reference to the mistaken idea that different racial groups of humans are more/less evolved rather than both being equally evolved but exposed to different environmental pressures (the most visually obvious being the average amount of solar radiation members of the group have been exposed to over a long period of time).

Are you serious? First, far less than 90% of the American public believe in evolution, second, those who do hopefully don’t all believe in the misleading characterization you just gave, and third, what does this have to do with eugenics?

“Higher organisms evolve from lower organisms” seems to me a pretty widespread trope, which is just one manifestation of the idea that certain organisms are “superior” to others. And further, rightly or wrongly, this seems to be how a lot of people have been taught in school. For example, I myself – granted, this was the 60’s – was taught that mammals came reptiles, and that mammals were “better” than reptiles because mammals were warm-blooded, had four-chambered, gave live birth, etc. You also see this idea of evolutionary advancement in imagery like Zallinger’s March of Progress. True or not, this is a common conception of evolution: multicellular creatures came from unicellular ones and are better; jellyfish are more evolved than sponges; mammals and birds are more advanced that fish, amphibians, or reptiles. And so on and so forth (the depiction of evolution has a fascinating history in and of itself actually), each successive age on Earth somehow being an improvement on the one before. Popular SF like Star Trek hasn’t helped matters any either.

The other point people tend to take away from what they learn in school is that you can breed for success; an improvement on Mother Nature actually, since you have a more direct control over the process as well as the an idea of the traits you want to select for or against, ie, you’re not staggering upward in a random walk but rather striding firmly forward. These are hardly uncommon beliefs even today. The sad thing is that these ideas are not obviously wrong but are almost right, which makes them more pernicious than they otherwise would be.

“The strange process of defining other peoples’ ideologies so that y0u can then tell them what they really believe, whether they know it or not, and criticize them for it.”

Ahem. You were here for the repeated rounds of libertarian bashing, right?

Anyway, I think that a fair history of the Progressive movement, with some attention on the eugenics and racism is a good idea because it belies the relatively silly idea that so much ‘progress’ belongs to one ideology or mode of thought, to the exclusion of all/most others. Their idea of progress ended up including a couple of things that we now consider deeply immoral. If it makes a little extra humility about controlling people’s lives and decisions, great.

SoV, could you use English? Because you aren’t making sense.

I hope Sebastian reads ScentOfViolets comment – read all the words. A lack of humility is an occupational failing of elites, not unlike some what often parades through these comments.

Scientific racism didn’t march for a while but rather marched all the way until the racism was defined as such and that it could no longer be regarded as scientific. Eugenics and race science represented and characterized science. It was biology. As Jonathan Marks likes to point out, it wasn’t exactly science that steered science away from the racism. Science pretty much failed to be self-correcting in this matter. Rather it was more like the humbling experiences of the Depression and the aggressive and brutal racializing policies that were coming full force in the 1930s and 1940s that gave people pause.

It’s historically accurate to link progressives to eugenics but you might as well link it with it with pretty much everyone else, including the anti-science crowd. For the latter, eugenics may have been unacceptable but the bigots on the right would have to give a nod and recognize that the egghead scientists had their hearts in the right place, even if those hearts were Godless or decidedly un-Christian.

From what coordinate on the ideological spectrum did the most significant criticisms of eugenics come? What social movements and ideological currents presented the challenge to this turn of the century intellectual racism?

@77

Riiiiight. Very convincing.

What about that Southern Strategy? Sure did work well. Now live with it.

And similarly, that is why the ridiculous rounds of libertarian bashing around here were so crazy. It wasn’t about finding out what libertarians really tend to think (as Caplan’s views were roundly bashed by libertarians far more prominent than him). It seemed to be something much more akin to in group/out group boundary enforcing. Which is why I noted that feminism tends to have VERY libertarian analysis in most cases. Because once you remove the out-group analysis/boundary enforcement, the exact same arguments suddenly become more convincing.

‘Which isn’t to say that churches are in the right about most things (or even many things). But organizationally, anti-slavery, anti-racism, and anti-eugenics movements were all very much religiously oriented long before their moral take was adopted by the US or European societies at large.’

That’s actually a highly dubious statement. It’s true that, as I pointed out, the Roman Catholic Church was strongly anti-eugenics (for precisely the same reasons that they are now strongly against stem cell research: ‘you shouldn’t interfere with Mother Nature’) but the Protestant churches weren’t nearly so bothered. Again, it’s true that may anti-slavery groups were religious. But then many pro-slavery groups were also religious (especially in the United States). Even within living memory, the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa was institutionally racist and aggressively supported the Apartheid regime.

It’s true that it’s kind of inherent to the Christian message that Christians not be racist (the idea that ‘we’ are all one with Christ being the essence of the Christian message). But of course that ‘we’ in the sentence above only means ‘Christians’. Historically speaking, Christians have been a lot less…er…’Christian’ to people who had the bad luck not to be born Christian: Muslims, for example, or ‘pagans’. Certainly the invasion of North, Central and South America had the backing of the Pope, and the enslavement of the native population (and quasi-genocide) there was the direct result of theological thinking: ‘we’ had a responsibility to go ‘over there’ and ‘save’ the poor pagans, preferably by working them to death in gold mines. (Of course some Christians opposed this, but they were very much in the minority).

As I pointed out, the reason Progressives and Conservatives and Liberals generally speaking tended to be in favour of eugenics in the period 1850 to 1945 was because of the omnipresent ideology of Empire. In order to justify ‘our’ God given mission to go out and conquer the world, a quasi-scientific ideology of Race had to be developed to justify this, and eugenics was the result. This also had the additional value of explaining why poor people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but racial theorising to justify imperial foreign policy goals was the key rationale behind it. And Progressives and Liberals (in the West) tended to be just as much in favour of Empire building as anyone else.

But, to repeat, this is not a discussion any American Conservative will want to have, because, of course, whereas most people on the Left in Europe and the US have become tired of Empire, on the Right, generally speaking, they think it’s still a peachy idea. Likewise, on the Right, there still tends to be a belief that the United States is ‘for’ white Protestant heterosexual males. Hence the hysterical claims about the Obama birth certificate and the explicitly racist and homophobic ‘Tea Party’ movement.

You have to give Goldberg credit for making sure the only 2 coherent paragraphs in his post were up front in the first screen. He has a point that Jill Lepore’s prose style can be difficult to take. He also has a point about scholars of hideous 19th-c ideologies mislabeling historical figures “conservative” etc. in order to accuse. (I have some sources but that’s too much for a comment box.) It repels readers who try to think the argument through or who are fond of the figures who are accused.

But I don’t see how you can just expel that kind of binary labeling. Not when there is an extensive tradition of conservative attempts to pin down the ideology of “modernism” or whatever it’s called these days. And a parallel tradition of attempts to pin down the ideology that results in death camps.

Which isn’t to say that churches are in the right about most things (or even many things). But organizationally, anti-slavery, anti-racism, and anti-eugenics movements were all very much religiously oriented long before their moral take was adopted by the US or European societies at large.

Sigh. Does anyone need to point out that Christianity as a credo is highly progressive – Jesus was a Hippy and all that? Or that Fundamentalism as it is expressed today, while very much associated with the Right is historically a rather recent phenomenon? This bespeaks of a rather appalling ignorance of Christianity in general and it’s recent history in particular.

@104: Are you really trying to whitewash all of Christianity’s history except “rather recent”?

Christianity as a credo is what the believer makes of it — there’s enough in the Bible to support pretty much anything. And this is amply demonstrated by centuries of Christians justifying just about everything and its opposite in the Bible (definitely including imperialism and slavery).

Of course if the society is 90%+ Christian, most of the pro-slavery *and* most of the anti-slavery movements will be Christian. But that’s just the base rate fallacy.

“Does anyone need to point out that Christianity as a credo is highly progressive – Jesus was a Hippy and all that? Or that Fundamentalism as it is expressed today, while very much associated with the Right is historically a rather recent phenomenon?”

See this is what I mean. Christianity isn’t ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ or whatever you want to do with modern political labels. It was one of the first religious movements to really take ideas of equality seriously, and in that sense Progressive ideology has borrowed from Christian thought. But labeling it after a nineteen hundred year later political ideology is just silly unless it was a picture perfect fit. You are just committing the fallacy which is the whole subject of this post–claiming the historical good while ignoring the bad. And with Christianity there is quite a bit of bad to go along with it. But hey points for using the phrase trying to whitewash of Christianity’s history while implying that I’m being *too mean to it*. It takes rhetorical guts to go that far out on a limb.

“What, Sebastian didn’t bother to note that the bashing was because some libertarian maintained that the 1880’s were more free than the 1980’s, and when this factual inaccuracy was pointed out, several more of these idiots doubled down on their stupidity rather than admit this was wrong?”

Ummm, I said both on this thread and the other, that it was unfair to characterize Capalan’s stupid rant as typical of libertarian thought without noting that MUCH MORE PROMINENT libertarians including Willkinson, Cowen, and McCardle bashed his rant on *specifically libertarian grounds*. Him doubling down on that, doesn’t make it any more characteristically libertarian just because you want to believe it is so. Especially when his response spurred another round of libertarians bashing him for it. If you want to take that point as a case of my intellectual dishonesty, you’re free to Humpty-Dumpty whatever definitions you want. I’m not trying to convince closed-minded fundamentalists. I’m just stating my actual position for the record.

Hmmm the blockquote didn’t come through. The “First, each of the movements” through “rise of the labor movement” was him.

Saying that eugenics is a “Progressive” position and thereby insinuating that all progressives are like Nazis is just stupid mudslinging.

Sebastian @110: That is quite a move. He has taken narrower social movements, many of which Progressives were opposed to at the time, and transformed them into examples of progressivism merely because we as a society NOW judge them to be correct. Progressivism as a movement wasn’t neutral to desegregation and eugenics, it was actively for segregation and eugenics.

I’d say this is “quite a move.” Are you saying that Progressives were generally opposed to political equality for women and blacks and generally supportive of eugenics and segregation? And are you also saying that “”we as a society,” rather than, well, liberals and progressives, now support (rather than, like many conservatives, merely have given up actively opposing) equality for women, blacks and gays?

“Are you saying that Progressives were generally opposed to political equality for women and blacks and generally supportive of eugenics and segregation?”

Of course I’m saying that. Progressives brought segregation to the Presidential administration. And their support, above and beyond the general societal support, for eugenics–especially the idea that black people should be restricted from having as many children– is well documented, as Holbo says in the main post.

“And are you also saying that “”we as a society,” rather than, well, liberals and progressives, now support (rather than, like many conservatives, merely have given up actively opposing) equality for women, blacks and gays?”

I would say that the societal norm in the US is that blacks and women should be not discriminated against and that they should have equal rights. (The only way you would get otherwise is if you define support for Affirmative Action as the necessary break point). Do some people deviate from the societal norm? Clearly yes. Does that deviation from the societal norm skew more to the right? Clearly yes. But is it a societal norm? Yes.

And with gay people, yes progressives are on the right side. Heaven knows I’m not arguing that they are definitionally wrong on everything.

@104: Are you really trying to whitewash all of Christianity’s history except “rather recent”?

Christianity as a credo is what the believer makes of it—there’s enough in the Bible to support pretty much anything. And this is amply demonstrated by centuries of Christians justifying just about everything and its opposite in the Bible (definitely including imperialism and slavery).

I thought Christianity was supposed to be primarily about the teachings of Jesus – you know, turn the other cheek, judge not lest you be judged, running the money lenders out of the Temple, all that sort of thing? And that the fun part of Christian-bashing is what flaming hypocrites a lot of them are six days out of seven?

No, the credo is just fine, thank you very much. It’s the people taking it as their own that’s the problem.

Sebastian: Progressivism was chiefly a movement against corruption and for administrative and civil-service reform and for business regulation, ie, for rationalized or “good” government. That’s what defined it and what was distinctive about it. There was also nativism, Jim Crow, and a serious eugenics movement, with which some – perhaps, I don’t know, many – Progressives sympathized and even collaborated. The question is whether this was a major or a minor feature of Progressivism. One might also ask whether opposition to civil-rights legislation on behalf of blacks, women, and gays has been a major or a minor feature of post-WW II conservatism in the US. I would say in the case of Progressivism, a minor feature; in the case of conservatism, a major feature.

Apologies for my lack of HTML .
Source for the Geneticist’s Manifesto:
http://www.estherlederberg.com/Eugenics.html.
Scroll down quite a ways.

Just from three Google sources it seems clear, especially from the first source I found above, that all kinds of well-intentioned people;

1) Misunderstood eugenics
2) Understood later that it was bad science and inhuman
3) Rejected eugenics

And that American political discourse was alot less dumb (and less materialistic) in those days. Nowadays, if your property happens to include media and advertising companies, you are free to disseminate whatever crap you want to.

lemuel,
Scott Kaufman did some of Goldberg’s work for him once, and it seems he’s still feeling sore about it. Daniel Kevles wrote an excellent work on the history of eugenics in the West that has not yet been surpassed.

Substance- right, thanks.

Or—even tho it’s never fun to call out your friends—maybe someone here (Berube?) ought to write a post on why Kaufman is wrong?

Well, I don’t see any actual historical argument there, only Kaufman’s unsupported assertions that the eugenics movement was somehow integral and necessary to scientific progress rather than being a shameful sideshow. If that post and his followup comments are all he’s got, there’s no substance there to refute. I would personally make exactly the opposite point; it’s demonstrable that given the knowledge and technology available pre-Watson/Crick, humans were about the least desirable organism imaginable for studying genetics; genuine scientific progress came from studying much more tractable model organisms , first Drosophila and then (and decisively for the advent of molecular genetics) all the way down the scale of complexity to bacteriophage. The eugenicists were more a diversion from the mainstream of scientific progress in genetics than a part of it.

Right — but the point is, LGM is one of the more prominent liberal blogs, several of its contributors write for The American Prospect, etc. So when you have a blogger there saying, as Kaufman does, that liberals should be proud to have supported eugenics because it was part of Science and Progress, then you can’t say — as Holbo does in response to Goldberg — that liberalism’s connection to eugenics is purely historical. Unless, that is, you also call out Kaufman’s BS.

You cannot ignore HOW progressives were in favor of eugenics and segregation being applied, that is, by persuasion and non-coercive means, and that they also rejected eugenics early and for both human rights and scientific reasons.

Alice de Tocqueville, can you be more explicit about what sources convinced you that Progressives who supported eugenics were not in favor of forced sterilization but only persuasion and non-coercive means. I followed the links you posted and don’t see evidence of that.

Yes, he really is saying that it’s to liberals’ credit that they supported eugenics.

Well, not in the material you quote. You’re reading of the quote and the quote itself are fairly close to opposites:

I’m not saying that eugenics per se was laudable.

Did you miss the “not” in that sentence?

Then when you claim he’s “doubling down” he does indeed double down – to say more strongly the exact opposite of what you contend he’s saying. He refers to eugenics as one of the “horrors” that resulted from downgrading the human body from its status as an object made in the image of God.

He supports that downgrade, but as the quoted material shows, he’s very careful to distinguish the benefits of that intellectual move from the “horrors” (his word, per your quote) that he also perceives.

politicalfootball-

You really need to read the post — he says clearly that eugenics was necessary to make the human body an object of scientific knowledge, which was essential to scientific progress. He says clearly that the reason liberals supported eugenics, and conservatives opposed it, was that conservatives were hostile to science and liberals were not. Certainly Berube read it as a defense of eugenics, as his comment there makes clear. And as a general rule, when someone says of something widely loathed, “I’m not saying it’s laudable, but…” it’s a pretty sure bet they are defending it.

Lemuel, what in the hell are you on about? What tribalism? He’s getting his ass handed to him in the comments to his post over there, as well as on this thread.

Steve-

I meant politicalfootball, just now. You’re right about the responses in general.

On the larger point, it’s true that you’re far more likely to find support for eugenics on the right than on the left today. But that doesn’t mean there are no affinities between liberalism and eugenics. There’s no shortage of liberals even now who want the “mission” in Afghanistan to “succeed” because of the good they imagine it will do for Afghani women, or who are comfortable with the principle of “humanitarian intervention” in general. It seems to me that imagining you can improve people’s lot by bombing and/or occupying someone else’s country is coming from a similar place as imagining you can do it by forcibly controlling someone else’s choices about childbearing.

One of the reasons I identify myself as a leftist rather than a liberal is that I think progress requires a mass movement of the people who stand to gain — it can’t be delivered from above. In his faith of the good intentions of elite planners (“Cruel and inhuman as some of those early 20th century tracts seem, their were many reformers who genuinely cared about the plight of the poor; … there was the belief that improving the conditions in which the poor lived would improve the quality of their stock”) Kaufman is, I think, succumbing to a temptation that really is widespread among liberals, even if most have better sense than to defend eugenics.

“Lemuel, what in the hell are you on about? What tribalism? He’s getting his ass handed to him in the comments to his post over there, as well as on this thread.”

Ummm, that wasn’t considered good evidence in the Caplan libertarian threads (were there really multiple threads by different authors?) just last week.

Unless of course there are different standards for bashing libertarians.

Alice de Tocqueville, I didn’t read all nine pages, but did read the page you linked, which reported Some evangelical intellectuals offered public opposition to the more extreme forms of eugenics. I don’t think this would support the general conclusion progressives were in favor of eugenics and segregation being applied, that is, by persuasion and non-coercive means and that they were opposed to compulsory sterilization. Is there something in the link you posted that gave you the impression you have regarding progressives and eugenics that I could read without looking at all nine pages?

you know, turn the other cheek, judge not lest you be judged, running the money lenders out of the Temple, all that sort of thing

How was running the money lenders out of the Temple an example of turning the other cheek or judging not lest you be judged? Doesn’t this tend to validate the claim that there’s enough in the Bible to support pretty much anything.

I’m scratching my head here; where’s the contradiction? You do know who Jesus is, right (or at least, said to be)?

You really need to read the post—he says clearly that eugenics was necessary to make the human body an object of scientific knowledge, which was essential to scientific progress. He says clearly that the reason liberals supported eugenics, and conservatives opposed it, was that conservatives were hostile to science and liberals were not. Certainly Berube read it as a defense of eugenics, as his comment there makes clear. And as a general rule, when someone says of something widely loathed, “I’m not saying it’s laudable, but…” it’s a pretty sure bet they are defending it.

Well, I think the bit about “liberals” generally supporting science while conservatives are generally hostile to it is pretty spot on, in fact, almost a defining characteristic of what it means not to be a conservative. And I’ll agree with the notion that accepting eugenics was not laudable, but . . . it’s a pretty good sign about the willingness to support empirical evidence and the scientific method. Let me put it this way: suppose the genes for Evil could be identified in human chromosomes, just like you could identify genes for height or hair color. Wouldn’t you generally be in favor of getting rid of those genes? If you say yes, whether it’s by force or persuasion that this goal is achieved, you’re pretty much on the side of eugenics movement.

SOV, I believe Jesus ran the money lenders out of the Temple because he judged them, decided they were guilty and, instead of turning the other cheek, took action against them.

lemuel quotes Kaufman: there was the belief that improving the conditions in which the poor lived would improve the quality of their stock

Stock? Were they soup? Were they stationers?

Why do English professors insist on doing history of science?

I think a case can be made that it was the “popular science” of the day. And in the late nineteenth century it certainly was the science of the day.

In any case, according to her defenders on wikipedia’s discussion page:

Eugenics is a theory of improving hereditary qualities by socially controlling human reproduction. Eugenicists, including the Nazis, were opposed to the use of contraception or abortion by healthy and “fit” women (Grossmann, 1995). In fact, Sanger’s books were among the very first burned by the Nazis in their campaign against family planning (“Sanger on Exhibit,” 1999/2000). Sanger helped several Jewish women and men and others escape the Nazi regime in Germany — “Margaret Sanger and the ‘Refugee Department’,” 1993.

SOV, I believe Jesus ran the money lenders out of the Temple because he judged them, decided they were guilty and, instead of turning the other cheek, took action against them.

Iow, you really don’t have the faintest idea who Jesus was, do you?

Well that’s one point of view. The other point of view is that eugenics was not the science of the day, that most people—including most biologists, etc.—did not accept it, and that those who did—including, unfortunately, some parts of the progressive movement—did so for particular reasons, and can’t be excused on the ground that “everyone believed in forcibly sterilizing poor women back then”—which is, after all, what we’re talking about.

Sorry, but calling it a “point of view” doesn’t magically make it so. As I noted upthread, the number of Americans who still believe in the “science” of eugenics is disappointingly large. In fact – as I also noted upthread – this particular idea was taught to schoolkids at least as late as the 1960’s, and probably a good deal later than that. Is it real science? Of course not. But that doesn’t stop a lot of people from thinking that it is.

It’s more complicated than that. On the one hand were discriminatory policies based on biological theories (for instance, in the US, institutionalization rates varied widely by state and in some states disproportionately targeted non-white men among adult men generally). On the other were people who tried to get birth control devices legalized by reminding policy makers that the poor could use them to limit the size of their families.

Exactly so. And this is where the racists show their hand, time and time again. Assume for the sake of argument that there is such a thing as intelligence that can be accurately measured by a single number, that it’s very highly heritable, and that identifiable groups can be proven to be of “inferior intelligence”. Now, I consider myself a moderate, not a liberal. But if I were going to show my liberal bona fides, this would be the place: racists like Murray believe in denying any educational or occupational resources to these low IQ groups on the grounds that they’ll just be wasted and could be put to much better use elsewhere.

Otoh, I would make a (nonscientific) case that even if all the above were true, that would mean these groups should get more of those exact same resources, perhaps much more. Not less. And that this is probably the best use one could make of them. So sue me.

SoV,

I’m not sure what you’re arguing. Are you saying that (in your opinion as an admitted non-liberal) liberals should not discuss the historical or scientific details of biology and of racism, in order to prove that they would have the correct moral beliefs even if racism is true?

Or are you saying that liberals should give Jonah Goldberg the benefit of the doubt and nuance his argument for him in the hopes that he will run out of disingenuousness before they run out of patience?

I’m not sure what you’re arguing. Are you saying that (in your opinion as an admitted non-liberal) liberals should not discuss the historical or scientific details of biology and of racism, in order to prove that they would have the correct moral beliefs even if racism is true?

Not at all. Just that there is a difference between science and the policy prescriptions based upon that science. And that’s how you can tell who the racists are – the scientific justifications keep changing, but the policies dictated by them always seem to be about limiting options, constraining choices, and denying resources to the afflicted groups. But there is not necessarily any “scientific” justification for those particular policies, even if the science happens to be valid.

Here’s a thought experiment, based upon the good kind of science: based upon studies of heritability, we can practically rid the world of hemophilia, Huntington’s chorea, etc as well as a goodly chunk of heart disease and cancer simply by denying those who carry those genes any right to reproduce. Bam! Problem solved.

It’s good science, and the prescription will definitely work if vigorously prosecuted, yet somehow, there seems to be something wrong here . . .

Do not feed the troll. ;)

I have as low an opinion of Jonah Goldberg as anyone here (maybe even lower, since I don’t feel obliged to write thousands of words in response to him), but it seems to me that if folks like Kaufman are liberals in good standing, Goldberg this once has a bit of a point. Or—even tho it’s never fun to call out your friends—maybe someone here (Berube?) ought to write a post on why Kaufman is wrong?

I disagree with Kaufman, but Kaufman understands that his argument, in some key ways, supports Goldberg’s argument.

I’m having trouble figuring out your view on this. Do I understand you correctly to say that you agree with Kaufman’s that the progressive movement, as it is currently understood, is indebted to eugenics? Then why do you approve of Berube’s rebuttal?

Kaufman acknowledges part of the problem with his own argument – he’s adopted Goldberg’s insistence on imposing current terminology on historical ideas. My problem with Kaufman is that he’s making the same argument that Bush supporters often did: Well, yes, the liberals were right about Bush when it came to the war, the economy, competence, etc., but the liberals were only right because they’re Bush-haters. I think Kaufman gives short-shrift to the idea that some conservatives of that day were correct because their analysis of the situation was more in tune with modern liberal ideas about individual rights, etc.

“Let me put it this way: suppose the genes for Evil could be identified in human chromosomes, just like you could identify genes for height or hair color. Wouldn’t you generally be in favor of getting rid of those genes? If you say yes, whether it’s by force or persuasion that this goal is achieved, you’re pretty much on the side of eugenics movement.”

Oh dearie. What’s the matter with you, SoV? This nonsense has nothing to do with credible science, no more than the underpinnings of the eugenics movement or of scientific racism (which were intricately connected, I’m not sure anybody has made that point yet) had any scientific credibility. Have you set out to make the point of the right-wingers?

During the teens and early twenties, when it was fashionable, and books about heredity talked about the Jukes and the Kallikak (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jukes_and_Kallikaks) (it was progressives, it appears, who discredited these studies). We have genetic counseling for things like Tay-Sachs and it is nothing more than eugenics, under another name.

Sanger appears to have advocated sterilization of people incapable of making their own decisions (feeble minded, profoundly retarded) but she never advocated forced sterilization for women of sound mind. On the contrary, her focus was always on giving women the ability to control their own reproduction and not to put the control in the hands of male doctors, religious figures or bureaucrats.

“Eugenists imply or insist that a woman’s first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state. We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother. . . .Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment” (Sanger, 1919a)

Note: “racial” as used above by Sanger, does not necessarily refer to one particular “race” but to the human race.

In any case there is a long tradition by religious fanatic abortion and birth control opponents of quoting Sanger out of context in order to attempt to paint her as a racist, which she was not and which can be demonstrated by her life and writings. These posthumous smears are disgraceful and dishonest. It is too bad if so-called “libertarians” are now taking them up. One can only say, like Eyore, “How like them.”

“Is it real science? Of course not. But that doesn’t stop a lot of people from thinking that it is.”

It almost seems as if you are saying that liberals (or progressives or whatever) are more likely to believe in popular pseudoscience than conservatives and that this is to their credit. Needless to say, I disagree.

To the contrary, a lot of people of all inclinations still believe this even today (I would not be surprised if a lot of schools still teach evolution this way.) And as for a century or more ago? Yep – it’s accepted as bog-standard science. Now know to be wrong, certainly. But still “scientific” back then.

“a lot of people of all inclinations still believe this even today”

Nobody doubts that a lot of people believe all kinds of stuff. I don’t get what this has to do with this thread and frankly I am still not sure what point you are trying to make.

Sanger appears to have advocated sterilization of people incapable of making their own decisions (feeble minded, profoundly retarded) but she never advocated forced sterilization for women of sound mind.

She defined “feeble minded” very loosely, though, didn’t she.

And again, that’s kind of beside the point. Suppose she had gone with something like an adult having the effective intelligence of a two-year-old. Would that change anything? How about if she had urged genetic counseling (assuming it was available in her day) on couples and advised them not to have children if they both carried the gene for Huntington’s chorea?

Is this still “bad”?

“if you honestly believe this is what the best science says – particularly if you’ve been taught it in public school – you can’t fault people for formulating policy around that belief”

– like, you can’t fault people to support slavery if they sincerely believe and have been taught in school that science supports XXX? I must be getting you totally wrong but I don’t know what to do about it. I think I have to give up at this point.

I came in late, but if anyone is still reading, what intellectual history/ies of eugenics do you recommend? Thx!

An interesting place to start on Eugenics in America is Gallager’s Breeding Better Vermonters.

Oh, God, I’m so sorry – Violets. That honestly wasn’t a limp bit of flaming; either I’m taking this too seriously, or it’s last night’s Cronenberg.

187 “She demanded that whole swathes of never-quite-defined poor souls be marched off to stifling fates because of the dangers she’d never established.”

“Demanded” ? “marched off”? Can you back this up with evidence in the form of a direct citation from Sanger herself, Ben Six? Or is this more of last night’s beer talking?

Also Ehrenreich’s Nazi Ancestoral Proof is very good on the internal contradictions of racial science and the opportunism of many of its German practitioners.

Oh, God, I’m so sorry – Violets. That honestly wasn’t a limp bit of flaming; either I’m taking this too seriously, or it’s last night’s Cronenberg.

Hakuna matata. My handle comes from a nineteenth century statistical mechanics problem.

Singer’s idea that prostitutes and criminal be sent to farms to learn morality is obviously one that no one would support today (though not long before that orphans from the cities used to be sent to the West to be adopted by farm families, in the hope of removing them from what was felt to be a blighted moral environment; and even today, Amish families in Pennsylvania have adopted unwanted crack babies from the urban ghettos — perhaps also to expand their own somewhat inbred genetic pool).

Planned Parenthood defends Sanger this way:

In 1927, the eugenics movement reached the height of its popularity when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, held that it was constitutional to involuntarily sterilize the developmentally disabled, the insane, or the uncontrollably epileptic. Oliver Wendell Holmes, supported by Louis Brandeis and six other justices, wrote the opinion.

Although Sanger uniformly repudiated the racist exploitation of eugenics principles, she agreed with those “progressives” of her day who favored

<blockquote• incentives for the voluntary hospitalization and/or sterilization of people with untreatable, disabling, hereditary conditions

• the adoption and enforcement of stringent regulations to prevent the immigration of the diseased and “feebleminded” into the U.S.

• placing so-called illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, and dope-fiends on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct

Planned Parenthood Federation of America finds these views objectionable and outmoded. Nevertheless, anti-family planning activists continue to attack Sanger, who has been dead for over 30 years, because she is an easier target than the unassailable reputation of PPFA and the contemporary family planning movement. However, attempts to discredit the family planning movement because its early 20th-century founder was not a perfect model of early 21st-century values is like disavowing the Declaration of Independence because its author, Thomas Jefferson, bought and sold slaves.

Sanger’s Outreach to the African-American Community

In 1930, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their city’s health and social services. Staffed by a black physician and black social worker, the clinic was endorsed by The Amsterdam News (the powerful local newspaper), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Urban League, and the black community’s elder statesman, W.E.B. DuBois.

Beginning in 1939, DuBois also served on the advisory council for Sanger’s “Negro Project,” which was a “unique experiment in race-building and humanitarian service to a race subjected to discrimination, hardship, and segregation” (Chesler, 1992). The Negro Project served African-Americans in the rural South. Other leaders of the African-American community who were involved in the project included Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.

The Negro Project was also endorsed by prominent white Americans who were involved in social justice efforts at this time, including Eleanor Roosevelt, the most visible and compassionate supporter of racial equality in her era; and the medical philanthropists, Albert and Mary Lasker, whose financial support made the project possible.

A passionate opponent of racism, Sanger predicted in 1942 that the “Negro question” would be foremost on the country’s domestic agenda after World War II. Her accomplishments on behalf of the African-American community were unchallengeable during her lifetime and remain so today. In 1966, the year Sanger died, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said:

” There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts. . . . Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.”

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:70anigwDe7YJ:www.plannedparenthoodnj.org/library/topic/contraception/margaret_sanger+Planned+Parenthood+Margaret+Sanger&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

See also: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/history-and-successes.htm
and: http://fundamentalistdeceit.blogspot.com/2008/01/demonizing-of-margaret-sanger.html

Harold –

Angela Franks comments on the Planned Parenthood biography.

Angela Franks is a Catholic theologian with an ax to grind.

That doesn’t, of course, preclude her from being right!

I was trying to answer parse’s question about a source, and looking at some other ref’s when I came across some alarming stuff. I think it’s more alarming than what happened 100 years ago. It’s about “Transhumanism” and “bio-medically enhanced warfighters”. (‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one’ – a guy walks into a research fellowship, and walks out, $773,000 richer, having re-written the protocols for biomedical ethics.)

I began with wikipedia’s Sanger article, and a link to this article:
State-sponsored Liberal Eugenics Has Just Begun

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D., and C. Christopher Hook, M.D.
Fellows

This is an article from 2006 stating:

“On April 29, 2006, Medical News Today announced that Case Law School was receiving $773,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to “develop guidelines for the use of human subjects in what could be the next frontier in medical technology – genetic enhancement.”

The article is a long, calm, careful description of what this project entails; briefly, the possible breach of a wall of separation that has (or had?) existed between research for therapeutic purposes – permitted, within detailed ‘informed consent’ guidelines – and the prohibition (stated) of genetics performed purely for enhancement.

Since the article was so old, before wriitng to the Fellows who wrote it, I decided to Google the name of the person who held the grant:

“Professor of law and bioethics Max Mehlman will lead a team of law professors, physicians, and bioethicists in a two-year project aimed at exploring guidelines for altering the human species through genetic enhancement.”

So here’s what turned up:
From Case Western’s Faculty page:
“Prof. Mehlman has been awarded a Templeton Fellowship for 2008-2009 at Arizona State University as part of a 4-year program funded by the Templeton Foundation entitled “Facing the Challenges of Transhumanism: Religion, Science, and Technology.” During the year, he will address the social, legal, and political implications of controlled evolution in a series of four workshops, and will summarize his thoughts in a book.”

And this:
“http://cetmons.org/thrust3_warfighter
Thrust Group Leader: Max Mehlman
Thrust Group Participant: Braden Allenby, Edward Barrett, Jessica Berg, Joel Garreau, Jason Gatliff, Leslie Henry, Stephen Helms Tillery, Patrick Lin, Margaret Kosal, George Lucas, Gary Marchant, Hunter Peckham, Insoo Hyun, Jared Silberman, George Poste, Todd Hardy, Bob Latiff, Dan Sarewitz, Anthony Jack, Jason Robert, Veronica Santos, Stuart Youngner

The Bio-Enhanced Warfighter Thrust Group is seeking funding to study the ethical, tactical and logistical , legal and policy, military-civilian, and strategic issues raised by the future deployment of biomedically-enhanced warfighters.

CETMONS – Consortium for Emerging Technologies, Military Operations, and National Security

http://www.templeton.org/ & http://cetmons.org/thrust3_warfighter

Now, I think of myself as not easily shocked; I’ve interviewed my parents about their service as Marines in WWII, been around since the Vietnam War and talked to hundreds of vets thereof, welded submarines as a civilian for the DOD, and visited all the AirForceBases in CA from Fairfield to Las Vegas (that I know of) and I don’t quite know what to make of these things. Did I copy where they call Mehlman the ‘thrust leader’?

I am putting this question without prejudice to whomever can enlighten me about these topics. Or whether they are as alarming as they sound to me. I urge anyone to read the article that lead to these sites, it is alarming enough in itself, since I know of protocols that were, as far as I remember, implemented 4 or 5 years ago, which allowed orphans to be used as guinea pigs in drug trials.

To parse: Apologies for not answering your interrogatory; all I can say at this point is to read the whole nine pages. It gives a perspective.
I’m off to prepare for a city council meeting, so won’t be online for some hours.

I want to say that no matter the darkness of the past, we live now, and let’s make the most we can of it!